2008 Woodie Awards
Alumni Column - Is the United States Ready for a New Progressive Era?
Jung Pak '96
Issue date: 10/25/07 Section: Commentary
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Joseph Kahn of The New York Times asked recently, "Can China Reform Itself?" Pointing to the highly publicized whirlwind of scandals involving Chinese-manufactured items such as lead paint on toys, poison in pet food and toothpaste, faulty tires and pesticide and industrial waste-laden garlic, shrimp, and ginger among other food items, Kahn ponders, "are the latest incidents enough to push China toward its own Progressive Era?"
Kahn's comparison between China and the United States is two-fold. He recognizes, as do most China observers, that the Asian giant is going through its own "Gilded Age." The term refers to a period after the Civil War that had as its slogan, "Get rich, dishonestly if we can, honestly if we must," according to Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, who popularized the label for the era. The Gilded Age recalls not only the amassing of great wealth by "robber barons," rapacious industrial practices and the growth of the middle class more and more interested in consumerism, but also deepening poverty among the vast majority of Americans in the late nineteenth century. Kahn also refers to the "Progressive Era" in the United States, a period of highly diverse reform movements spanning issues from temperance to suffrage, which emerged from the recognition that the chaos of industrial society could not be left in the hands of market forces. Armed with moral clarity and a faith in progress, Americans organized themselves to agitate for social, political, and economic reform.
In China, the combination of economic liberalization, technological advances, increasingly integrated markets, and the formation of modern corporations over the past three decades have created some two dozen billionaires, countless millionaires, and lifted 500 million people out of poverty. The economic boom, however, is largely confined to the coastal and urban areas; over 50 percent of Chinese still live on less than a dollar a day, 120 million migrant workers seek work in the burgeoning cities, and unemployment in rural areas is as high as 20 percent. Factories dump industrial waste into rivers that had once provided people with food and income, and toxic dust settles on villages contributing to alarming rates of cancer and respiratory illness.
Kahn's comparison between China and the United States is two-fold. He recognizes, as do most China observers, that the Asian giant is going through its own "Gilded Age." The term refers to a period after the Civil War that had as its slogan, "Get rich, dishonestly if we can, honestly if we must," according to Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, who popularized the label for the era. The Gilded Age recalls not only the amassing of great wealth by "robber barons," rapacious industrial practices and the growth of the middle class more and more interested in consumerism, but also deepening poverty among the vast majority of Americans in the late nineteenth century. Kahn also refers to the "Progressive Era" in the United States, a period of highly diverse reform movements spanning issues from temperance to suffrage, which emerged from the recognition that the chaos of industrial society could not be left in the hands of market forces. Armed with moral clarity and a faith in progress, Americans organized themselves to agitate for social, political, and economic reform.
In China, the combination of economic liberalization, technological advances, increasingly integrated markets, and the formation of modern corporations over the past three decades have created some two dozen billionaires, countless millionaires, and lifted 500 million people out of poverty. The economic boom, however, is largely confined to the coastal and urban areas; over 50 percent of Chinese still live on less than a dollar a day, 120 million migrant workers seek work in the burgeoning cities, and unemployment in rural areas is as high as 20 percent. Factories dump industrial waste into rivers that had once provided people with food and income, and toxic dust settles on villages contributing to alarming rates of cancer and respiratory illness.
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